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<font size="+2"><b>In Tucson's sprawling suburbs, recession has
dimmed the American dream</b></font><br>
<p>
<font size="-1">
By Philip Rucker<br>
Washington Post Staff Writer<br>
Tuesday, January 11, 2011;
10:16 AM
<br>
</font>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
TUCSON - North Soledad Avenue is wide and perfectly curved. The
sun rises from the east, up over the Santa Catalina Mountains,
painting a morning sky of brilliant pinks and soft blues. Each
ranch house is ornamented with the kind of desert yard that
requires little maintenance: palm trees and prickly-pear
cactuses, gravel or stone or red pebbles.
</p>
<p>
This was the dream - a quiet and peaceful block tucked within
the endless suburban sprawl of northwest Tucson. It drew
working-class settlers over the past 15 years in search of a
fresh start. A construction worker came because there were
thousands of kitchens to build. An aircraft mechanic came for
the sunshine. A nursing home worker came because everything was
cheap - land, gas, groceries.
</p>
<p>
But now, recession-ravaged North Soledad Avenue is a symbol of
shattered dreams. The street's asphalt is cracked, like a
windshield hit by tiny rocks. One man's three-tier plaster
fountain has no water. Another's inflatable Santa sits in his
front yard, out of air.
</p>
<p>
And the 22-year-old high school dropout who lives with his
parents at the middle of the block is in federal custody,
accused of attempting to assassinate <a
href="http://www.whorunsgov.com/Profiles/Gabrielle_Giffords"
target="">Rep. Gabrielle Giffords</a> (D-Ariz.) and killing
six others in a shooting rampage Saturday.
</p>
<p>
"I had so much hope when I moved here, but it's down now," said
Stephen Woods, the aircraft mechanic, who has been out of a job
for a year. "It's difficult to live here nowadays."
</p>
<p>
Arizona is a state being defined by the nation at this hour,
even as it redefines itself. This onetime border outpost grew
into an oasis of wide open spaces and limitless opportunity, a
place where people could parachute in anonymously and hit
restart.
</p>
<p>
Here was one of America's greatest booms, but also one of its
biggest busts, and the just-bottomed-out economy seems to have
given way to a simmering ugliness. Pima County Sheriff Clarence
W. Dupnik, in a news conference Saturday, called Arizona "the
mecca for prejudice and bigotry."
</p>
<p>
There is no evidence that the inflammatory rhetoric that
recently came to define Arizona's politics set the stage for
Jared Loughner's alleged shooting spree. Yet the gunning-down of
a congresswoman who had been laboring to bridge that divide, an
ambitious Tucson native who had a sunny, even romantic view of
Arizona and what it could become, has focused the attention of a
country still searching for answers on what Arizona is.
</p>
<p>
The neighborhood where Loughner grew up, and where authorities
said he planned Saturday's devastation, opens a window onto the
stew of cultural, economic and political tensions that are
shaping modern Arizona.
</p>
<p>
In the area around North Soledad Avenue, the median household
income is $65,000; the median age, 35. Most of the houses have
three bedrooms and were built in the 1970s or 1980s. Nearly half
of the households moved in during the 2000s, according to an
analysis of census data.
</p>
<p>
Roger Whithead arrived here in 1995. Tucson was an escape from
Detroit, where he grew up and went to college, and from
Colorado, where had had been living after that. He builds
kitchens and bathrooms, and with Arizona's population swelling,
there was plenty of work.
</p>
<p>
He didn't know most of his neighbors, but that didn't seem to
matter much. "Socially, everyone keeps to themselves," said
Whithead, 52. "I know the fella right here and over there, but
that's about it."
</p>
<p>
Over the past decade, things started changing. People moved in
from California and Oregon. Whithead was doing their kitchens,
but he's a conservative and didn't like their liberal politics.
</p>
<p>
"We don't need to start that here - the bigger government, more
welfare," Whithead said.
</p>
<p>
At the other end of the block, Shauna Quintero and her
utility-inspector husband are raising a young family. Quintero,
29, calls herself a conservative independent and said she is
concerned about what's happening 80 miles south at the Mexican
border.
</p>
<p>
Quintero said her neighborhood, like her state, is divided
politically. "You have your yeses and you have your nos ... and
there's no gray in between," she said, holding her daughter,
Lola, 1.
</p>
<p>
The recession of 2008 brought Arizona a blitz of bad news:
layoffs and foreclosures, more layoffs and more foreclosures.
Suddenly, life for folks across this sprawling city seemed like
it might not be sustainable.
</p>
<p>
Whithead stopped vacationing in the Virgin Islands. Woods drew
unemployment benefits. The Quinteros downsized.
</p>
<p>
"We're not obsessed with keeping up with the Joneses anymore,"
Shauna Quintero said. "Arizona was big into that - buying more,
living bigger - and we participated in all of that. Now our
lives are smaller."
</p>
<p>
Tom Zoellner, a writer and fifth-generation Arizonan who is a
close friend of Giffords's, said this state represented "a
certain manifestation of the American dream - a place to move
that's clean and bright and free of prior associations. ...
</p>
<p>
"You have, in a sense, a comfortable fantasy."
</p>
<p>
But, added Zoellner, who has lived here only off and on since
2003: "The relentless growth in housing and in real estate
helped cover the rocks under the river. It papered over the kind
of hard reality that we've been avoiding here for many years."
</p>
<p>
That reality is a place where people have few, if any, ties to
one another. Tucson is divided by boulevards stretching six or
eight lanes wide and extending for 15 or more miles into the
horizon. The subdivisions here are often separated by concrete
walls.
</p>
<p>
"There's a society of perpetual newcomers, where it's been very,
very difficult to create any kind of community cohesion," said
Thomas Sheridan, a state historian and University of Arizona
anthropology professor.
</p>
<p>
Giffords tried to use her office to create a stronger sense of
community. It is telling, then, that she held her "Congress On
Your Corner" meet-and-greet outside a Safeway.
</p>
<p>
"There may be no more iconic public square in Tucson than a
strip mall on a major street," Zoellner said.
</p>
<p>
Five miles west of the crime scene, Whithead has been living off
savings for the better part of a year, since the home design
firm he worked at shuttered. He does odd jobs here and there,
but ever since the banks tightened up lending, fewer people can
score a $50,000 check to remodel their kitchens.
</p>
<p>
"Now, they come in with just what they've saved to replace a
cabinet," Whithead said, standing in his front yard near the
paloverde tree that he said will bloom this spring into "a big
yellow ball."
</p>
<p>
He hasn't given up on Arizona. As he walked back into his house,
he passed his white pickup. On the rear windshield is a sticker:
"Capture the Dream."
</p>
<p>
<i>Staff researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.<br>
</i></p>
<p><i><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/11/AR2011011102838.html?hpid=topnews">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/11/AR2011011102838.html?hpid=topnews</a><br>
</i>
</p>
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